The OPT-ional Phenomenon in Singapore English: A Corpus-based Approach Using Time Annotated Corpora

Abstract

The Optional Omission of Past Tense (OPT) is prevalent in the colloquial register of Singapore English (SCE). This paper describes the investigation of the OPT phenomenon based on time annotated corpora. The Singapore and Hong Kong version of the International Corpus of English were extended with time annotation for this study. In Singapore English sentences that contain the perfective aspectual adverbs of already or yesterday, the OPT-ional phenomenon is found to be present 68.2% of the time. Although this phenomenon is also found in Hong Kong English, it is significantly more prominent in Singapore English (p<0.05, z=6.27). In SCE, there are also syntactic constraints that influence the OPT occurrences, where the omission of past tense occurs 39.8% more frequently in sentences with pre-verbal adverbs than post-verbal adverbs.